IOP Publishing, Plasma Sources Science and Technology, 3(18), p. 034001, 2009
DOI: 10.1088/0963-0252/18/3/034001
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One of the most commonly used methods to do plasma diagnosis is the analysis of the Stark broadened line profiles emitted by the atoms or ions in the plasma. The shapes of these lines strongly depend on the density of charges in the plasma. This permits to use some the line characteristics, as its width at half maximum, as a diagnostic tool to obtain the plasma electron density. It's more, the dependence of the line shapes is more important when the Stark effect is linear, as for hydrogen or hydrogenic ions, what has been a reason of the wide use of these elements in plasma diagnosis. In fact, the determination of the plasma electron density from the hydrogen Balmer beta full width at half maximum (FWHM) is a well-established diagnostic method [1-3]. In many cases plasma diagnosis has been done using only the FWHM of a experimentally recorded line. However, more information on the plasma state can be obtained from the measured profiles, as the shapes of many lines strongly depends on the kinetics of the emitter and the heavy perturbers in the plasma. This kinetics, that gives rise to what is known as ion-dynamics effects, alters not only the line widths but the shape of the full line. The emitter and heavy perturbers velocities depend on their masses and on their temperatures, that may be different from the electron temperature if the plasma is not in kinetic thermodynamic equilibrium. Then, the comparison of the measured profiles with calculated profiles obtained taking into account ion-dynamics effects, as well as non-equilibrium effects can become a more sophisticated diagnostic method to obtain plasma conditions. One of the theoretical methods that allow to consider those kinetics effects readily are computer simulations. This simulations, although may require a considerable cost of calculation, are considered as the most efficient method to obtain spectral line shapes [2,4]. Besides, the consideration of non equilibrium effects in these calculations can be done without additional cost. Calculated Stark profiles are obtained from the Fourier transform of the emitter dipole moment autocorrelation function averaged on a ensemble of emitters. Every emitter evolves perturbed by the local dynamic electric microfields due to the charged particles that surround it. These are the local electric microfields that give rise to the Stark effect. In the calculation one must obtain the evolution of the emitter atom perturbed by the dynamic electric field and then take the average on a representative sample of perturber configurations. This requires to solve the time dependent Schrödinger equation for the emitter suffering the local electric field. This is the aim of the computer simulation used by our group. The plasma physical model employed in our simulations, based on the " classical path approximation " [5-9] considers that the plasma is weakly coupled, globally neutral, homogeneous and isotropic. In this model, the ions and free electrons are considered as independent classical point particles that move inside the plasma creating a electric field on the emitter atom. In the simulations the velocities distributions for the particles are obtained according to a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution assuming thermal equilibrium. Numerical simulation permits to consider Topic number: 5